Lightly edited copy of an email I sent to my spiritual director today in advance of our session for November. I’ve been writing these for several years now, primarily in order to help me focus my mind before we talk. It’s not a record or an agenda of our sessions. (Often enough, we start discussing something else and never get back to it.) I archive them to the blog so I can go back later and see what I was thinking about a given topic at the time I posted them.
8:48 PM (41 minutes ago)
Hi Sister —
Good news — you won’t have as much to read before Monday’s Zoom session! Like so many people with my political and spiritual leanings, I’ve been engaged in a major rethink since the election and it hasn’t left much time for writing. Something I learned when I was writing for a living — there are times when a little bit of writer’s block can be your friend!
And this is one of those times.
Thanks very much for sending me the Mary Oliver poem [“Wild Geese” — see previous post HERE for context]. I’ve read it several times, and each time I find something new to think about. I’m letting it percolate for a while, and see where the spirit — and Oliver’s flight of wild geese — is leading me.
(I have to add this: Just got back to my computer after supper, and discovered this new message on Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/956067889309302?multi_permalinks=1080244526891637
(It’s the Mary Oliver poem, with a headnote by the administrator of a FB group I started following last month: “This poem invites us to let go of personal struggles and embrace the beauty and freedom of the natural world. Through the imagery of wild geese soaring freely, it highlights the resilience and timelessness of nature while gently reminding us of our place within it.” More to think about! Maybe even a sign, one of those ambiguous nudges I get from time to time from the Holy Spirit.)
In the meantime, I’ve mostly been coming to terms with the election outcome. It seems like a pretty harsh repudiation of my beliefs and the things I feel like I’m called to do. Matthew 25 stuff, be a “little Christ” to my neighbors, as Luther put it. Not that I question the call. It’s just that I want to rethink it. What works? What doesn’t? Where do I go from here?
Excerpts and links to two journals. The first, the day after the election:
1. https://ordinaryzenlutheran.com/2024/11/06/desolation-2/ — Nov. 6 — “Jesuit spirituality as a antidote to desolation in the aftermath of a lost election in a dying empire”
[…] Tuesday’s election was a hard punch in the gut. I knew the electoral college could go either way, but I never expected the popular vote to go for a neofascist self-proclaimed wannabe dictator. I thought Kamala Harris’ campaign was inspiring, and I’m going to have to take some time to grieve the loss of optimism, yes, of joy, and the loss of my sense of what America might be. Should be. Let’s call it what it is.
Most of the rest of it was about the discernment of spirits. The second post I wrote after I discovered the presiding bishop (national leader) of my branch of the Lutheran church released a video message to members on the national website:
2. https://ordinaryzenlutheran.com/2024/11/11/is-trump-a-fascist-its-complicated-how-should-people-of-faith-react-thats-complicated-too/ — Nov. 11 — “Is Trump a wannabe theocrat? It’s complicated. How should people of faith react? That’s complicated, too:
(As you can see from the URL, I moderated my language a little as I worked on the journal, calling the president-elect a “wannabe theocrat” instead of a “fascist.” Not that he doesn’t meet both definitions, but “fascist” is turning into a meaningless clobber word.) My lede:
Standing in front of a tapestry at her office the day after President-elect Trump won the 2024 election, Bishop Elizabeth Eaton videotaped a somber, nuanced message. Presiding bishop of my church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, Eaton doesn’t always speak for me on all issues. (No one else does! Why should she?) But this time she did.
The occasion was the election of a divisive figure who promotes, on the one hand, a white Christian nationalist agenda, saying he’ll protect Christians from a “radical left” that wants to “tear down crosses where they can, and cover them up with social justice flags”; and who stokes fears among people of faith, on the other, that: “Our parishes, schools and neighborhoods have to prepare for difficult times.”
Eaton went on to paraphrase Matthew 25. I went on to quote church leaders from several other denominations — United Methodist, Baptist, an evangelical Protestant social justice advocacy group — and an article in America magazine by Cecilia González-Andrieu, professor of theology at Loyola Marymount University, who summed up what I’m feeling in one sentence: “For now, our young have learned that we live in a reality where there is no ‘we’.” No sense of the common good.
Of everything I’ve been reading on the subject, González-Andrieu’s article speaks most directly to me. Possibly since I taught for so many years in a faith-based college. (I was lucky. My kids were of the generation inspired by President Obama. I can’t imagine what it would be like to teach undergrads today.) And partly because ends, good Jesuit style, with a call to action:
We will need to feed each other. We have to prepare for the loss of health care and other safety nets for our elderly and sick. We will need to come together to bind each other’s wounds. Our schools, universities and libraries may become targets; our books may be banned and our journalists jailed. We will need to teach each other to remember what is true. [Italics in the original.]
To which I said: González-Andrieu’s call to action becomes a call to renewed faith:
“There’s much work to do,” she concludes. “The reign of God is groaning under the weight of human egoism. Only its complete opposite—neighbor-carrying generosity grounded in love—can free it.”
See you Monday at 6 p.m.
__________
* Photo by Gregory Starrett (CC BY-ND) appeared in Joyce Dalsheim and Gregory Starrett, “Christian nationalism is downplayed in the Jan. 6 report and collective memory,” The Conversation, Sept. 6, 2022 https://theconversation.com/christian-nationalism-is-downplayed-in-the-jan-6-report-and-collective-memory-189440.
[Uplinked Nov. 23, 2024]
Ordinary Time 